Every hotel holds a lineup. Most of them spend it on occupancy, arrivals and the day’s VIPs, which the team could read from a sheet. The general managers I interviewed for the book use the same fifteen minutes to do something harder: to put the standard into the team’s hands, one small conversation at a time. This page gives you thirty topics for that conversation and a card to run the meeting from.
Why the lineup matters more than the manual
A luxury hotel at full occupancy produces several hundred guest interactions a day, across the desk, the rooms, the restaurants, the spa and the door. No leader can watch all of them. The book’s chapter on perfection makes the point plainly: the standard has to live in the team’s training, hiring and daily lineup to the point where it operates almost on its own, with the leader held back for the cases the team cannot catch. The lineup is where that transfer happens, because it is the only moment the whole shift is in one room with its attention on the work rather than on a guest.
The leaders in the book attend it themselves. In my earlier book on hoteliers, Luc Delafosse, then managing director of Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, described spending part of every morning at lineup meetings with staff about to start their shift, as one piece of a routine that also included lunch in the employee restaurant and two hours each evening in the lobby. The point is visibility. A standard set by someone the team sees every day carries differently from a standard set in a memo.
“If you walk by a problem, then you are the problem.” Philip Barnes, then General Manager, The Savoy, London
How to run it
Keep the operational part short. Arrivals, departures, VIPs, anything broken, in five minutes. Then spend the remaining time on one topic from the list below, led by whoever is running the lineup, with one question to the room and one story from the floor. The card holds the running order and the month’s topics so that the same meeting can be run by a different manager each day without losing its shape.
Two rules make the topic part work. Ask for a real example from the last week, from the people who were there, and let them tell it. And close with one thing to try on the shift that starts in ten minutes, so the topic leaves the room with the team.
The thirty topics
- What did a manager do yesterday that showed the standard without saying a word?
- The empty coffee cup: what small faults did we walk past this week, and who saw us do it?
- Where does a guest first meet our standard, and what do they see in the first ten seconds?
- Name a colleague who fixed something that was not their job.
- When you are watched by a trainee, what do you do differently? Should you?
Knowing the guest
- One thing we learned about a guest yesterday and what we did with it.
- Which returning guest arrives this week, and what do we actually know about them, as opposed to what the profile says?
- The guest history is a snapshot. How do we check it before we act on it?
- What did a guest not ask for that we could offer anyway?
- Who on the team noticed something no one else did?
- When did a guest last tell us they felt looked after, and what exactly had happened?
- Scripts: which phrases do we use that sound like a hotel rather than a person?
- A moment this week when a colleague chose kindness over procedure.
- What can we do today that no app could do for this guest?
- How does the guest know we are glad they came?
Recovery
- What went wrong yesterday, who fixed it, and how long did it take?
- Which failures could the person who first heard about them have fixed alone?
- Listening before explaining: a complaint we handled well, and one we did not.
- What would it take to compensate without being asked?
- Which cause of complaint have we now seen twice?
The team
- Who joined in the last month, and who are they going to with questions?
- What did someone on this team teach you this week?
- A decision one of us made without permission that turned out right.
- What is the kindest thing a manager ever did for you on shift?
- Who deserves to be named in front of this room today, and for what?
The craft
- What does good enough look like at your station, and when did we settle for it?
- One thing at the threshold of your section that you catch before it reaches the guest.
- Which part of our service could a competitor copy, and which part could they not?
- What do guests remember from a stay here, in their own words?
- If you ran this lineup tomorrow, what would you want the room to talk about?
What to watch for across a month
The topics repeat in rotation, so the same question comes back five or six weeks later. Watch whether the examples change. A lineup that keeps producing the same story about the same colleague has stopped reaching the floor. A lineup where new names and fresh moments come up each time is doing what the general managers in the book use it for: turning a standard the leader holds into one the team holds.